Long Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

The root of many of the world's problems is our own short-sightedness and inability to see the big picture.
Those blinks will set you on the path of the long term consequences of the actions we take.

Open your mind to a long-term view.
If we hadn’t invented glasses some time ago, shortsighted people would have a serious problem.
It’s not only our eyes but our minds  that are shortsighted.

Once upon a time, our shortsightedness was beneficial;finding food, for instance, and avoiding predators.
When faced with the problem of malaria-carrying mosquitoes on the Asian island of Borneo, the World Health Organization (WHO) responded by spraying vast areas of the island with DDT
Due to WHO’s shortsightedness, the Royal Air Force was forced to airdrop cats into Borneo’s affected areas to bring the rat population back down.

"We are the only species that has the capacity to alter our environment so profoundlyto make it unlivable"

We place a huge importance on time and getting things done efficiently, so why is it so difficult for us to consider the long-term consequences of our actions
We can only truly understand what we’re able to experience, so the longest stretch of time we can really comprehend is around 80 years or so, which is next to nothing relative to 4.6 billion years of earth's life.
Though we struggle to deal with deep time, we excel at living by the seconds and minutes of the clock.
So what are the long-term effects of running our lives by the clock?
This pressure to make snap decisions and provide fast results often adversely affects the quality of our responses.
We also tend to eschew long-term solutions like dieting and exercise, instead favoring drugs that relieve our immediate symptoms.
This mentality can lead to returning symptoms – often worse than before – and deteriorating health.

Automobiles are a prime example of short-term thinking.
No thought was given to the long-term impact they would have on human society.
Wars have been waged and thousands of lives lost in the name of that automotive necessity, oil.
Still worse, number of lives lost in every war, falls far short of the number of lives lost in car accidents.
There are other, more existential issues that cars cause; each driver, for instance, exists within his own personal bubble, separated by glass and steel from his fellow man.
It’s exactly this kind of isolation and dissociation from one’s neighbor that can lead to the erosion of local communities.

Unlike cars, your neighborhood’s small businesses are great at bringing people together.
When a small business opens up in a neighborhood, unlike a chain store, they can’t just pack up and relocate if customers are unhappy, which gives them an incentive to try extra hard.
Local businesses also help their area’s economy by keeping on average 55 cents of every dollar spent within their community.
And with a strong local economy, there’s less need to use resources for long-distance shipping and transportation, both of which damage the environment.
By helping create a strong local economy, new local businesses will emerge and your community will be in good shape for future prosperity..

There’s a good chance you or someone you know has had to deal with the stressful problem of getting out of debt.
Getting in debt in the first place is often the result of short-term thinking.
Credit cards are an easy way to rack up debt, and they’re a shining example of costly shortsightedness.
The logic behind using a credit card is the very definition of short-term thinking. You’re essentially saying, “I’ll buy this now and worry about paying for it later.”
By promoting credit cards, our financial system is actually encouraging us to use short-term thinking and get ourselves weighed down with debt. This system is only concerned with stimulating the economy, and since people who’ve accumulated debt are people who’ve spent money, the individual details don’t matter. The economy is being stimulated.
But this doesn’t change the fact that it’s in the best interest of the economy to give people credit cards and promote mindless consumerism.
If people don’t spend, companies lose money and employees get laid off, which leads to even less spending and even more people losing their jobs.
On the other hand, our economy can’t withstand all this debt either, and there will eventually be a breaking point.
People need to realign their values with the things that bring true, long-term happiness.

A return to long-term sustainability means a return to small farming,
Once you start thinking about long-term prosperity, it becomes clear that new energy sources must be developed.
Even though we tend to focus on our individual problems, we’re also responsible for the world we live in.

Think sustainability and always put the long term generations in your decisions.

Adapted fro. Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World by Jim Brumm on Blinkist. Blinkist offers the best knowledge from nonfiction in powerful, memorable packs.

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